Sorin gains his inspiration, not only from American burlesque cinema, but also from Jacques Tati, by recalling certain situations and imbuing them with the same wit. But he also uses this inspiration to create a certain distance and provoke us in our relationship with the image, introducing instability as a recurrent theme of fiction, and of the reality that both surrounds and swamps us. J'ai même gardé… dates from 1993 and stigmatizes the artist's desire to divide up the image, to broaden the field of vision, and to unsettle the viewer. Every time we wish to get at the image we seem to be doomed to witness a scenario in which the accident or fall is untiringly repeated, in which the multiplied bodies vibrate through an excess of weakness, distortion or shifts. We could say that Pierrick Sorin has invented a sort of anti-hero in whom to confide our own fears, an accomplice to our dirty little tricks, a subject for our displeasure who is himself subject to overwhelming dizzy spells, in search of an alphabet to crack between his teeth, an impotent adult comically perched on the decline of his adolescence. Six monitors repeatedly show the same film whose flow of narrative is disturbed by its constant repetition, creating juxtapositions, leading to improbable interpretations, breaking the linearity in order to allow an undisciplined succession of movements to be seen and muffled words to be heard. An intentionally syncopated rhythm incites total disorder in the organization of a narrative that attempts to make itself understood. The viewer is thus invited to reinvent a story from the fragments offered, as if trying to reassemble his or her own image using broken shards of a mirror. In a desperate and comical attempt, the character is offering to tell us, much against his will, secrets of sordid debility, when books fall down on his head, quashing the already thwarted desire to confide. Standing in front of these screens watching these rudimentary catastrophes, we catch ourselves dreaming of the end of all worlds as if orchestrated by some science-fiction scriptwriter, with little means at his disposal. This huge joke could turn at any moment, and become quite cruel. Behaving like a half-wit, expressing himself clumsily and with such difficulty, the character evokes a crime victim confused by the blur of images. But there is nothing to say that the book is supposed to contain all knowledge, and it would be hasty to deduce that it trembles with all its might in anticipation of crushing the slumping ignoramus. We watch as the video revolves, in spite of it all, around the illiterate figure, sapping his energy as he succumbs to the blows of a collapsing bookcase. What is shown here, with trepidation, is a shift, an amputation. The narrative awaits an image, or vice-versa: the image is incomplete and in need of decomposition to make up for an absence, an absence of speech that has been wiped out, annihilated; a body that has been broken.

Pierre Giquel

Translated by Diana Tamlyn